Alien: Engineers
Alien: Engineers, noto anche in vari momenti durante il suo sviluppo come Alien: LV-426, Alien: Genesis e Alien: Origins, è stato la bozza del copione per un prequel di Alien scritto nel 2011 da Jon Spaihts. La storia modificata è poi divenuta il film spin-off Prometheus. Mentre i personaggi e la trama complessiva di Alien: Engineers sono stati mantenuti in Prometheus, lo script è comunque molto diverso dal film che è stato realizzato. Trama Tre ingegneri atterrano su un pianeta lussureggiante. Uno di essi mangia un pezzo di torta cerimoniale, cucinata in uno sciame di piccoli insetti simili a scarabei che lo dissolvono. Su una montagna vicina, una donna umana primitiva guarda i restanti Ingegneri ripartire a bordo della loro nave mentre uno degli scarabei la morde sul retro del collo, fondendola con il DNA dell'Ingegnere defunto. Indeterminati secoli dopo, la dottoressa Jocelyn Watts e il professor Martin Holloway stanno scavando sott'acqua utilizzando una coppia di sommergibili. Essi scoprono un grande obelisco con scritte aliene. Tornati in superficie essi studiano le scansioni dell'obelisco e scoprono, nascoste nel testo alieno, una serie di coordinate stellari. Essi informano della cosa Peter Weyland, presidente delle Weyland Industries, il quale accetta di finanziare una spedizione scientifica per seguire la mappa stellare alla sola condizione che ogni tecnologia aliena che essi scopriranno dovrà essere consegnata alla sua impresa. Non trovando un altro finanziatore, Watts e Holloway accettano. Il direttore delle operazioni di Weyland, Lydia Vickers, e un avanzato prototipo di androide di nome David, li accompagnano nel viaggio. Il gruppo si dirige verso il sistema indicato sull'obelisco a borde dell'astronave Magellan, comandata dal Capitano Janek. Janek, come la maggior parte del suo equipaggio, è scettico e preoccupato per la missione, ma hanno accettato di prendere parte ad essa con la promessa di ricevere paga tripla. La Magellan raggiunge la sua destinazione, il sistema stellare Zeta II Reticuli, e trova traccia di strutture potenzialmente non naturali su una luna chiamata LV-426. La squadra scopre diverse piramidi sulla superficie della luna, tra cui un grande complesso all'interno di una serie di crateri regolari collegati da trincee profonde, suggerendo che si tratti di una costruzione artificiale. Janek atterra sull'LV-426 e il team scientifico inizia ad indagare. Entrati nella più grande piramide, essi cominciano a mappare la struttura con dei droni remoti. Spaventati da una registrazione olografica, due della squadra, Fifield e Millburn, decidono di fare ritorno alla nave. Il resto della squadra scopre attrezzature per la terraformazione al centro della piramide, così come una pila di antichi cadaveri di Ingegnere eviscerati. A satellite the Magellan left in orbit detects a large storm front moving with the moon's sunset, and Janek orders everyone back to the ship. They barely make it; Watts is almost blown away by the savage winds but David rescues her. Once on board, they realise Fifield and Millburn never returned. They contact the men by radio, and find they have become lost inside the pyramid. They have plenty of supplies, and Janek tells them to hold out until they can return after the storm has passed in the morning. The team on the Magellan celebrate their discovery. Afterwards, Watts and Holloway autopsy an Engineer's decaying head that they recovered from the pyramid. That night, Millburn is attacked by a centipede-like creature and killed, whilst Fifield is subdued by a swarm of the scarab-like insects. The following morning, Vickers awakens a team of mercenaries secretly stowed away aboard the Magellan and places them in charge of the expedition. The team returns to the pyramid to try and locate the missing men and continue their exploration. Under Vickers' orders, several of the scientists begin disassembling the terraforming equipment so it can be returned to Earth for study. Watts and Holloway discover more dead Engineers, each with their chest burst outwards, but Holloway falls down a shaft and gets separated from the rest of the team. Janek discovers Millburn's corpse and orders his crew back to the ship, although Vickers' mercenaries and several scientists remain to deconstruct the terraforming machine. Watts and David also stay behind to find Holloway. They eventually find him wandering aimlessly with no real memory of what happened to him; they take him back to the ship. Once there, Watts and Holloway make love, but a creature suddenly bursts from Holloway's chest, killing him. The white, boneless alien creature quickly escapes into the Magellan's ventilation system. The crew begin searching the ship, while Watts returns to the pyramid, following the location data recorded by Holloway's spacesuit, hoping to find out what happened to him. She finds that he was attacked by an octopoid creature that latched onto his face. As she moves on, she encounters David aboard a large Engineer spacecraft hidden underground. David reveals that the ship was headed to Earth with plans to wipe out humanity using genetically-modified, weaponized versions of the creature that attacked Holloway. However, the creatures got loose and wiped out the crew before they could carry out their mission. In a large chamber filled with leathery eggs, David attacks Watts and allows one of the weaponized creatures — a Facehugger — to subdue her. When she regains consciousness, Watts just barely makes it back to the Magellan and climbs into a Med Pod. The Chestburster within her bursts from her chest in the middle of surgery to remove it, and Watts dies. However, the Med Pod's systems manage to save her life and repair the damage. When she wakes, she sees the now fully grown attack and kill one of the crewmembers as he enters the room, but she manges to shoot the creature before it can turn on her. Watts discovers that several of the crew have been gruesomely killed by the creature that came from Holloway in her absence, which is now fully grown and hiding on the lower decks. She informs the survivors of the Engineer ship and its mission to wipe out humanity, a mission that David is now attempting to resume. With no alternative, the survivors elect to try and stop him while Janek stays behind to try and fix the Magellan, which David has sabotaged. Aboard the Engineer vessel, the remaining crew and mercenaries confront David as he revives a final Engineer from hypersleep. The Engineer decapitates David and slaughters most of the team, but Watts survives while Vickers escapes with the leader of the mercenaries, Shepherd; Vickers and Shepherd encounter the now mutated Fifield as they flee through the pyramid and are killed. Watts returns to the Magellan and kills the creature that emerged from Holloway just as it prepares to attack Janek. They see the Engineer ship leave and set off in pursuit, but are unable to catch up with the much faster Engineer vessel. However, when the Engineer pilot is killed by a Chestburster that erupts from his chest, his ship falters, allowing Janek to crash the Magellan into it, destroying the Magellan, killing Janek and fatally crippling the Engineer vessel. Watts jettisons from the Magellan's wreckage in an escape pod. Back on the surface, she is attacked by the huge Ultramorph that emerged from the Pilot, but she eventually kills it with a circular saw. In the aftermath, Watts is contacted by David, who tells her that it is likely the Engineers will come to investigate. As she considers this, the pyramids on the moon transmit a distress signal into space. Modifiche Prima dell'inizio delle riprese la sceneggiatura venne pesantemente modificata da Damon Lindelof. La modifica più importante è stata la rimozione dell'elemento prequel della sceneggiatura, spostando l'ambientazione della storia al pianeta LV-223 e girando il film in modo autonomo ambientato nello stesso universo di Alien, ma non ad esso direttamente collegato. Questa dissociazione anche comportato la completa rimozione degli Xenomorfi dalla storia. Invece, l'arma biologica utilizzata dagli Ingegneri nel film è diventato un liquido nero che sembra essere copiato da quello presente nella serie televisiva X-Files. Nonostante questi cambiamenti, l'idea che gli Ingegneri hanno cercato di distruggere l'umanità servendosi di un'arma che si è poi ritorta contro di essi è stata ripresa nel film realizzato. È interessante notare che la compagnia di Peter Weyland è conosciuta come Weyland Industries nella sceneggiatura di Spaihts, esattamente come è nota nel film Alien vs Predator. Nel film Prometheus la società è stata invece chiamata Weyland Corp. Sono inoltre presenti numerose modifiche nei nomi: la Magellan è stata ribattezzata USCSS Prometheus, Jocelyn Watts è diventata Elizabeth Shaw, Martin Halloway è diventato Charlie Halloway, Lydia Vickers è diventata Meredith Vickers . Xenomorph changes While it features the traditional Xenomorph from Alien, Spaihts' script also introduces new variations of the species with new attributes or abilities. During the story, David makes it clear that the Xenomorphs seen in the Alien films are not naturally-occurring organisms, but rather biologically engineered weapons of war, created and/or modified for purpose by the Engineers. David goes on to imply there are other variations of Xenomorph designed for specific purposes, variations which have yet to be seen. The Alien has long been theorized to be an unnatural creation, a concept endorsed by Alien director Ridley Scott, but the idea has never been officially confirmed in the films. Perhaps the most notable of the new Xenomorphs described in the script is the creature born from Holloway on board the Magellan. The script later implies this so-called "Beluga-Xenomorph" may be the progenitor of the Xenomorph species, or at least an earlier iteration of it, stating that the Eggs and Facehuggers discovered by the crew of the Nostromo in Alien are "an evolution" of the molluscoid eggs and Octo-Facehugger that impregnates Holloway. The Beluga-Xenomorph is said to be white in color, as opposed to the predominantly black Xenomorphs, and is able to reshape its malleable body to squeeze through small openings. The screenplay also features a Jockey-Xenomorph or Ultramorph, the existence of which was implied in Alien when Dallas, Kane and Lambert discover the Pilot's corpse aboard the derelict, its chest burst open. Spaihts describes the Ultramorph as "dark gray, armored, lethal... more hideous than any Xenomorph we've seen". The creature grows even more rapidly than typical Xenomorphs, at one point visibly increasing in size as Watts watches it feed on the rotting Engineer head recovered from inside the Engineer facility. Trivia *The large black obelisk Watts and Holloway unearth in the opening scenes and the ring-like space station where Watts and Holloway meet with Peter Weyland both bear remarkable similarities to comparable devices in Stanley Kubrick's seminal 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. *At one point, Holloway mentions "Prometheus bringing fire from heaven" to the crew of the Magellan, unintentionally foreshadowing the title and theme of the film that was ultimately made. *The script states that the Magellan lands on LV-426 on December 31st, 2172. However, the Nostromo supposedly lands on the moon in 2122, which is 50 years earlier. Note Categoria:Sceneggiature